Wild boar were imported into Saskatchewan in the late 1970s as domestic livestock. Some escaped from farms and created reproducing populations in the province.

They have now been reported in over 60 rural municipalities in southern Saskatchewan, damaging golf courses and crops, harassing livestock and threatening people.

READ MORE: Saskatchewan beaver derby causes controversy

There is also the potential for diseases to be transferred to domestic hogs.

“SARM is pleased with these changes as escaped wild boar pose a danger to people, personal property, other wildlife and to livestock,” said Ray Orb, president of the Saskatchewan Association of Rural Municipalities (SARM).

“We need to make sure their population is kept under control and are hopeful these regulatory changes will achieve that.”

Officials say hunters should still ask for permission to hunt on private property and to not hunt along roads or road allowances.

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That’s still much longer than warranted, said Dr. Paul MacPherson, an HIV researcher with the Ottawa Hospital Research Institute’s chronic disease program and associate professor of medicine at the University of Ottawa.

READ MORE: Blood donation ban for gay men dropped to 1 year from 5

Although gay men are at higher risk of HIV infection — they represent slightly less than half of HIV cases in Canada, according to estimates by the Public Health Agency of Canada — he believes that the risk of HIV getting into the blood system if that timeline was reduced is very low.

That’s because of how Canadian Blood Services tests donations, he said. Blood Services does two tests on every batch: a test for antibodies and a “nucleic acid test”. The concern is what’s known as the “window period” — the time between when someone contracts HIV and the time at which it can be detected.

For an antibody test, he said that the window is about 42-50 days. For the nucleic acid test, results can be detected in approximately nine days, according to Canadian Blood Services. That’s much less than a year.

“I would say the window period should match the science,” he said. “I think Canadian Blood Services is just being super extra-cautious in putting it out to a year, but there’s really no good data to say it needs to be one year.”

So, to be cautious, he thinks the window period should be closer to two months.

And both he and Dr. Mark Wainberg, a professor of medicine and director of the McGill University AIDS Centre, believe that Canadian Blood Services should include some questions about donor behaviour in its screening of gay men.

“If you’re a man in a long-term, stable relationship and you and your partner are both negative, then the risks are exactly the same as those of a heterosexual couple,” said Wainberg, who is also a former president of the International AIDS Society.

“Why is it ok for a heterosexual college student who’s 19 years old who’s had sex with 40 women during his hormonal years, why is he able to give blood and a gay man who’s in a long-term stable relationship is not? It’s just stigmatizing, it’s demeaning, and it doesn’t make any scientific sense.”

“All gay men are not at risk for HIV,” said MacPherson. “A good proportion of gay men, like heterosexuals, are in monogamous relationships. So yes they may have had sex yesterday, but if they’re in a closed partnership, you can’t introduce HIV unless they’re having sex with multiple partners. So is it gay men, or should it be people who are sexually active?”

Incremental steps

Canadian Blood Services’ policy regarding men who have sex with men dates from the 1980s, when HIV screening was nowhere near as good as it is now.

Originally, it was a complete ban on donations from any man who had had sex with a man anytime from 1977 onwards.

Then, in 2013, it was reduced to banning any man who had had sex with a man in the last five years.

This was seen as an “incremental step” toward opening up the policy, said Dr. Mindy Goldman, medical director of donor and clinical services for Canadian Blood Services.

“It was a safe change. We did not see any decrease in safety, any increase in the number of donors found to be HIV-positive for example after going to the five-year deferral period.”

Soon, it will be a one-year deferral — something that she agrees is “greatly in excess” of their testing window periods. But testing isn’t everything, she said.

“How it’s supposed to work is we complete all testing before products are put into inventory, so that blood products of people who test HIV-positive or for hepatitis or whatever are destroyed and are not used,” she said.

“But you could have situations where your test doesn’t work properly or you have an error and products are put into inventory or you’re in an emergency situation where you cannot do the test before shipping product, etc. For those types of situations obviously you would prefer not to have a lot of HIV-positive units in that.”

WATCH: Liberals could reverse ban on blood donations from gay men (Oct. 2016)

Canadian Blood Services will monitor the effects of the new one-year limitation on blood donations, looking for whether more HIV-positive samples are detected, and surveying donors to see whether they truthfully answered all the questions on their screening form, she said.

And, the agency will consult with interest groups like patient groups, the medical community and LGBTQ groups to come up with an updated donation policy — a process that could take years. It took three years to reduce the waiting period from five years to one, and further changes will require research, as there are fewer examples from other countries to look to, she said.

All that means that it’s unlikely the restrictions on donations from gay men will be lifted during this current federal government’s mandate — as the Liberals promised during the election campaign.

And although Wainberg believes that it’s a sensitive and delicate issue, he thinks that policy change has been held back by political interest groups to the point where it no longer makes sense.

“We now have these fantastic ultra-sensitive screening tests. We didn’t have those in 1983 and 1984 and now we do. So you have to really ask the question, is it still worth maintaining an official policy of discrimination against gay men in light of all this advance in technology? And when they say the science supports this, I think that’s nonsense. The science doesn’t support it.”

As teased by band members Nick Carter and Brian Littrell, the Backstreet Boys are experimenting with country music, apparently with country pair Florida Georgia Line.

Carter posted to his Instagram account from what appears to be a recording studio.

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In the studio with my @backstreetboys recording a song for @flagaline new album. Also working on the new backstreet album as well. Get ready!!! #backstreetboys #countrymusic #floridageorgialine #new music #collaboration

LONDON – As continental powers pressure a nervous Britain to formally apply to exit the European Union, die-hard “remain” supporters are taking on the mission to put the brakes on the so-called Brexit.

The challenge is formidable: Britons turned out en masse for last Thursday’s vote to leave the EU, deciding the matter in a close but credible election long promised by the ruling government. Britain’s Conservative Party and opposition Labour Party have both pledged to respect the popular vote and work quickly toward easing the U.K. out of the EU.

Britain’s jilted partners have also shown little inclination to revisit the matter.

“I don’t think we should see any shadow boxing or any cat-and-mouse games,” European Commission President Jean-Claude Juncker said Tuesday. “It is clear what the British people want and we should act accordingly.”

READ MORE: English language could be dropped from European Union

But between the vagaries of Britain’s unwritten constitution and the determination of the losing side to stay in the EU, some lawyers, lawmakers and “remain” activists see room for hope.

“The beauty about this situation is that nothing seems to be impossible. So I wouldn’t rule anything out at this point, including the United Kingdom staying in the EU. I think it would be a very difficult thing to pull off, and I think a lot of things would have to happen first, but at this moment don’t discount anything,” says Anand Menon, professor of European politics and foreign affairs.

WATCH: Protesters gathered at a pro-EU rally outside the UK Houses of Parliament on Tuesday following last week’s historic referendum result.

Here are some of the suggestions from the pro-EU camp on how Britain could end up staying in the bloc, and an evaluation of each one by Gavin Barrett, an expert on European constitutional law at University College Dublin:

Ignoring the referendum

Parliament has no explicit legal obligation to implement the referendum’s decision. Conceivably, elected representatives in Westminster could just ignore the electorate’s verdict and opt to stay in the EU.

That’s the argument put forward by Labour lawmaker David Lammy, who implored colleagues on 桑拿会所: “Wake up. We do not have to do this. We can stop this madness and bring this nightmare to an end through a vote in Parliament. Our sovereign Parliament needs to now vote on whether we should exit the EU.”

Lawmakers could slow the invocation of Article 50, the exit clause enshrined in the EU’s governing Treaty of Lisbon, perhaps playing for time.

But Barrett says the idea that lawmakers could shrug off the popular vote altogether is fanciful.

“On a likelihood scale, I’d say zero per cent,” he says. “Governments cannot simply ignore the directly expressed will of the people.”

Invoking a Scottish veto

Britain’s Parliament cannot normally legislate on Scottish matters without the assent of Scotland’s staunchly pro-EU parliament in Edinburgh. Given that a withdrawal from the 28-nation bloc would likely mean quashing the application of EU laws in Scotland, some argue that gives Edinburgh a veto over the final decision. By the same token, some say that Northern Ireland’s legislature could also stand between Britain and Brexit.

Nicola Sturgeon, Scotland’s separatist-minded first minister, appears to have endorsed that view.

“The option of saying we’re not going to vote for something that’s against Scotland’s interests, that’s got to be on the table,” she said in a recent television interview.

READ MORE: Nicola Sturgeon is the only credible leader left in British politics after Brexit vote

So what are the chances that the Scots will ride to the rescue of England’s pro-EU minority?

“Zero per cent as well,” says Barrett. “Under the British constitutional system, Westminster is sovereign at the end of the day.”

Holding another election

British politics have been thrown into turmoil. Conservative Party leader and Prime Minister David Cameron has pledged to resign and his rivals are jockeying for position. The opposition Labour Party is in meltdown amid a bitter fight over the party’s leadership.

Could a pro-EU party, or a pro-EU wing of the Tories or Labour, emerge from the chaos and fight an election on a platform of bringing Britain back into the European fold?

READ MORE: How low can the British pound go?

A major challenge to that scenario is that elections aren’t scheduled until 2020 and that between now and then the Conservatives’ euroskeptic wing is likely to remain in power.

“Political circumstances have combined to make it quite unlikely that a pro-European government will be elected,” says Barrett. “Very, very unlikely.”

Holding a second referendum

Calls for a second referendum actually predate the first one, and a well-publicized web petition calling for a new vote has already attracted nearly 4 million names (although how many are linked to genuine British voters is anyone’s guess.)

But what if, instead of a do-over, the referendum were presented as a choice between the EU membership Britain has had until now and whatever new deal governing trade relations it could secure in its exit negotiations with the bloc.

Conservative lawmaker Jeremy Hunt — a contender to replace Cameron — has floated the idea of a second vote on any new deal. In an opinion piece in the Daily Telegraph newspaper, he wrote that “we need to negotiate a deal and put it to the British people, either in a referendum or through the Conservative manifesto at a fresh general election.”

Barrett predicted that any exit deal negotiated by Britain would be “bound to be inferior” to what the U.K. had before — and that EU powers would put aside their pride to welcome a wayward Britain back into the bloc if voters then endorsed a decision to stay. Of all the possibilities, he said, “I’d put my bet on that.”

Now in its sixth year, the Jasper Dark Sky Festival celebrates the wonder of one of the world’s largest dark sky preserves, an area kept free of artificial light pollution. Jasper received dark sky preserve designation in 2011.

As daylight hours begin to recede, October is the ideal time to celebrate the skies, according to the festival. Over the past few years, the festival has grown into a celebration over the course of two weekends during dark sky month, including speakers and activities that promote science, space and conservation.

READ MORE: Where you can go to see the stars this summer

Other notable speakers at this year’s festival include scientist Bill Nye, best known for his educational television program Bill Nye the Science Guy, and Canadian Space Agency astronaut Jeremy Hansen.

Nye will present two shows – one on Friday, Oct. 14 and another on Saturday, Oct. 15. Hanson will speak on Saturday, Oct. 15 at Centennial Field.

READ MORE: William Shatner explores relationship with ‘Star Trek’ co-star Leonard Nimoy in new book

Takei will speak at the Jasper Dark Sky Festival on Friday, Oct. 21.

Tickets for the festival go on sale on Monday, July 4. For more information visit the Jasper Dark Sky Festival’s website.